Helena Bonham Carter can do no wrong in my book. She was a soaring Shakespearean comedian in "Twelfth Night" and a standard-issue neurotic New Yorker in "Mighty Aphrodite." In "A Room with a View," "Howards End" and others, she's always provided an oasis of intelligent and thoughtful performance.

In "The Wings of the Dove," she has the nastiness and perversity of Henry James to negotiate and does so admirably. The American James is the dead literary guy flavor-of-the-season, having replaced Edith Wharton and Jane Austen as source for story ideas in Hollywood these days (remember "Portrait of a Lady" and "Washington Square" of recent times). I look forward to the day when producers start looking to those standbys of the '20s and '30s, Somerset Maugham and Stefan Zweig. Now, those fellows could really spin a good yarn.

James is a bit darkly psychological for my taste, and somewhat vague for a movie adaptation, although writer Hossein Amini slashed and compressed to retain the book's essentials in his script.

Carter plays Kate, a girl who is trying to live the life prescribed by her rich guardian, Aunt Maude (Charlotte Rampling looking exceptionally malevolent). As long as she lives with Maude and expects to inherit, she will have to submit to a marriage, no doubt loveless, with one of Maude's wealthy set.

But Kate is already in love with a poor, left-wing journalist named Merton, played by Linus Roache. (The movie is set a little further into the early 20th century than the book, allowing for a little free love and unchaperoned moments between men and women.)

Kate is trying to maintain her relationship with Merton and live the life of silk dresses and gala parties to satisfy her aunt. Merton just wants to get married and grows weary of the deception.

But an even more complex deception develops. Kate befriends Millie (Alison Elliott), a rich American on a European grand tour. Millie is soft and generous, and obviously meant to be attractive and somehow

"special." From my point of view, she is rather uninterestingly played by Elliott, who is far enough from being beautiful to make Millie's allure difficult to understand.

Kate, who despite her love for the financially challenged Merton really enjoys the luxuries Maude offers, concocts a plan she slowly draws Merton into. She wants him to make Millie fall in love with him. Kate is sure that when Millie dies of the illness that seems - from the cinematographic point of view - only to make her more ethereal looking, she will leave her money to Merton. Then he will be rich and free to marry Kate.

Roache, with his thin and fragile face, has an air of incorruptibility that serves the movie well. As he slowly complies with Kate's wishes, you have the sense that he is repeating the classic experiment with the frog in which instead of immersing a frog straight into a pot of boiling water out of which any sensible frog will immediately leap, the frog is put in a cold pot that is gradually heated. It's the slow cooking that kills him. As James points out with seeming relish, if you're sly about it, even the incorruptible can - slowly - be corrupted.

Under Iain Softley's direction, "Wings" drips with restraint (far from the operatic "Portrait of a Lady," which was directed by Jane Campion). There is a sense here that man's lower instincts will reveal themselves even though they are draped in the banner of such goodnesses as love and friendship. Although Kate's instincts are largely mercenary, at least part of her motivation for

"giving" Merton to Millie is based on a desire to make Millie's last months joyous and full of love. But just as cynical old James is sure that people are selfish and petty, he is also sure that even good impulses ultimately get us into trouble.

Softley and Amini say they consciously viewed Kate as a film noir kind of heroine, a beauty leading a good man astray. And that, added to the setting of the second half of the movie in canal-riven Venice, gives the story the kind of moral haziness that verges on Thomas Mann territory. It could easily have been subtitled "Death in Venice."